This talk was given at the American Sociological Association meetings in 2019 in New York City My mother called me one day, during my first semester of graduate school. She was curious about this mysterious world of academia that I had committed myself to. She wanted to know how it was going. “Are there oth...
Last month, I attended the Sociologists for Women in Society conference in Denver, CO. My colleagues and I gathered and discussed the current conditions at our respective institutions. We discussed racism, microaggressions, gender inequities in pay and workload distribution. We vented, we raged, we continue … “Whe...
Yesterday, I started my day at the bus station in Atlanta where I go several days a week to assist asylum seekers who have been released for ICE detention centers and are in route to meet their sponsors. Most have been released from McAllen, Texas and when I meet them in Atlanta, they have already spent between 24 and ...
In my first week of graduate school, I got a phone call from my grandmother. Up until then, I’d spent a lot of time accompanying her to doctor’s appointments, translating and advocating for her, fighting with insurance companies that wanted to cut off her benefits or refused to approve the latest medication prescri...
I originally wrote this for QED: A Journal for GLBT Worldmakers. It appeared in their Fall 2016 special issue. In light on the one year anniversary of these tragic events, I thought I’d share it with you. Pulse: A Space for Resilience, a Home for the Brave Katie L. Acosta How many nights have I spent at Latinx n...
On Moving Past the White-Washed Academy The first time I went on the job market I became acutely aware of the unique space faculty members of color inhabit within it. I had spent years preparing for that first tenure-track job; taken all the right classes, focused on publishing and followed the rules of networking. I h...
I remember the day when I realized that the Academy was not going to be a safe space for me. I was a graduate student and still painfully naïve. I had spent several years working in the corporate world where I had been truly miserable for a number of reasons and I had envisioned that academia would be this wonderful p...
